I'm cleaning up some old Linux kernel sandboxes, and
came across a patch which I had long ago made in a
local copy of include/asm-mips/processor.h but which
does not seem to have been propagated more widely.
I had added "__attribute__((aligned(8))))" to the
declarations of the mips_fpu_hard_struct and
mips_fpu_soft_struct data structures, presumably
because there was a need to ensure 64-bit alignment
of the elements so that LDC1 instructions would work.
We don't generally have a problem here, presumably
because either the previous data declarations naturally
align things to 64-bits, or because we've ensured things
at a higher level of makfile compiler directives. Are we
in fact guarnateed to be safe without the source code
directive, or should those __attribute__ directives be
added as insurance?
Kevin K.